5 ways online customer feedback can optimise your webshop
23 Feb 2017

You are an online marketer or eCommerce manager of a successful webshop and you’ve got all the necessary tools up and running. You’ve got your ads and retargeting efforts that provide you with leads. Then there’s A/B testing which provides insight into what is and isn’t converting your visitors. Meanwhile your web analytics and heatmaps are showing you what’s happening on your site. This is often the basic toolkit for webshops, which is logical, because it is important to know what your visitors are doing on your website. Unfortunately these tools don’t provide a complete understanding of the customer…

Such tools explain the behaviour of visitors, but do not provide insight into the story behind the numbers. The fact alone that 1000 visitors leave your ordering funnels early doesn’t explain why they are leaving. Online customer feedback not only provides you with the answers to these types of questions, but it can also be used for various other purposes.

Below are five ways why online customer feedback can optimise your webshop and make it even more successful.

1. Stop assuming and start getting answers

Have you always wondered why your visitors do the things they do on your website? With event-driven feedback, you are given the opportunity to ask these visitors for feedback based on their behaviour. These are, for example, visitors who linger on a product content page for a long time or have filled in all of their information and then still decided to abandon the ordering process. At such moments, you just want to ask the customer one thing: “Why?!”

Event-driven feedback is triggered by rules that you’ve set beforehand. For example, if you want to know why the exit rate is so high on certain pages, you can arrange it so that upon leaving, the visitor is presented with a feedback form on those pages. This provides valuable insights that can be used to optimise specific parts of your webshop.

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2. Differentiate yourself from the competition

As a smaller webshop, you do everything possible to steal market share from the “big dogs”. Competing with price is an option, but competing with service and experience is a smarter long-term strategy in my opinion. By gathering feedback at key moments in the customer journey it becomes clear how your customers experience important online processes. It also shows that you value the opinion of your customers.

Asking your customers for feedback provides useful and actionable insights. It allows you to make structural improvements that make it easier for your customers to order. The easier it is for customers to get something done via your digital touchpoints, the more likely they are to come back. This ensures a higher customer loyalty, leading to more sales and a better customer experience.

3. Convert your exit rate into more online sales

We previously wrote an article about the ROI of Online Customer Feedback because this is what webshops are ultimately focused on: more sales! Online customer feedback has both long and short-term wins that are easy to achieve. One is catching visitors who have dropped out of an ordering process.

A number of advanced feedback tools offer (as described above) the possibility to collect event-driven feedback. By applying this in every step of the ordering process, you can catch visitors who want to leave the page, either by closing their browser or navigating to another part of the website. In your web analytics, you can see that this includes a large number of visitors. Therefore, it pays to take advantage of additional sales here.

4. Monitoring your webshop in real-time

Web analytics is a standard tool in the toolkit of marketers. However, aside from the fact that statistics cannot provide a full range of insights, it is also the data of yesterday. This means that you aren’t immediately aware of what is happening in your webshop the moment it happens. Fortunately, online customer feedback offers a solution.

The advantage of a feedback tool is that it is live data. In other words, when someone provides feedback, it is immediately registered. Nine out of ten times, the structure of a feedback form consists of a score and and open text option, which gives the visitor the opportunity to identify the category of the feedback. By setting up smart alerts on various feedback forms, you will get an instant notification when visitors, for example, report that a process is not working, or when a certain process suddenly receives all low scores.

With live feedback, you know exactly what is happening in your webshop. You can receive these alerts in your email or have them directly sent to your mobile. So you can either wait until tomorrow to review the data of today or you can use online customer feedback to see and understand what is happening right now.

5. Find out who your ambassadors are

No other marketing tool is as powerful as the effect of word-of-mouth advertising. One person’s experience can deter thousands of visitors from ordering OR it can be that final push in making the decision to purchase. But how do you know which customers are your biggest fans? Very simple: just ask them.

Satisfied customers often go through the trouble of letting you know when they are satisfied and that is very valuable. This group of customers can be used as a separate customer segmentation in your marketing campaigns. Often times, as a marketer, you have to keep up with a massive load of customer data that contains all previous orders and customer information. Adding online customer feedback to the equation ensures that you have insight into which customers are your promoters.

Use that data when making targeted offers to encourage repeat purchases. It doesn’t need to be very complex. When a customer clicks on the category, ‘Compliment’ in a feedback form, you can immediately ask for an e-mail address. Export this group of customers and your file of satisfied customers is ready to use!

Enhance your toolkit with online customer feedback

Well, there you have it – as you can see, online customer feedback is the final piece of the puzzle. It is a win-win solution for both you and your customers. With deeper insights into how your customers experience your website you will be more than well-equipped to optimise ordering funnels and more importantly, keep your customers happy and loyal to your brand.

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Want to learn more about Mopinion’s all-in-1 user feedback platform? Don’t be shy and take our software for a spin! Do you prefer it a bit more personal? Just book a demo. One of our feedback pro’s will guide you through the software and answer any questions you may have.